Community

A small Reddit thread regarding if unused variables and imports are better as errors or warnings:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3emo
In my opinion in this case errors are too much, warning are enough.
Few situations for those warnings:
- warning for unused variables (as GC, C# and other compilers do);
- warning when a variable get used in some ways, and then its last assignment gets unused (done by a kind of C compiler);
- unused imports (useful to keep code clean and remove unnecessary module dependences);
- unused functions (but this is harder to do in a clean way in a language that has templates, so this may be omitted).
Among those four warnings the most useful are the first two ones. In C once the unused variable warning of GCC has found at compile time a bug in my code (I did forget to increment that variable in the loop). So I have loved this warning ever since.
Bye,
bearophile

== Quote from bearophile (bearophileHUGS@lycos.com)'s article
> A small Reddit thread regarding if unused variables and imports are better as
errors or warnings:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3emo
> In my opinion in this case errors are too much, warning are enough.
> Few situations for those warnings:
> - warning for unused variables (as GC, C# and other compilers do);
> - warning when a variable get used in some ways, and then its last assignment
gets unused (done by a kind of C compiler);
> - unused imports (useful to keep code clean and remove unnecessary module
dependences);
> - unused functions (but this is harder to do in a clean way in a language that
has templates, so this may be omitted).
> Among those four warnings the most useful are the first two ones. In C once the
unused variable warning of GCC has found at compile time a bug in my code (I did
forget to increment that variable in the loop). So I have loved this warning ever
since.
> Bye,
> bearophile
If we make unused imports an error, how is anyone supposed to do import
someSmallLibrary.all? If you make unused imports an error, the collective cost of
extra import declaration boilerplate will probably be larger than the GDP of some
African countries.

I agree, unused variables should be treated as warnings.
In my opinion, warnings should be employed only in situations where the
compiler detects that the programmer might have made a mistake, but which
are not impeditive of compiling and running the program. Having unused
variables clearly is not impeditve of your program compiling and running
correctly, so if you are going to treat them as errors instead of warning,
might as well treat all warnings as errors. A good programmer will make sure
the code compiles without warnings anyway, so claiming that warnings are
ignored by the programmer is not a valid rationale in my opinion.
And there are situations where you happen to have unused variables and still
want to be able to compile, as when debugging for example. It should at
least be optional whether the compiler treats these situations as errors.
Cheers,
"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:i4luk9$2rdg$1@digitalmars.com...
> A small Reddit thread regarding if unused variables and imports are better
> as errors or warnings:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3emo
>
> In my opinion in this case errors are too much, warning are enough.
>
> Few situations for those warnings:
> - warning for unused variables (as GC, C# and other compilers do);
> - warning when a variable get used in some ways, and then its last
> assignment gets unused (done by a kind of C compiler);
> - unused imports (useful to keep code clean and remove unnecessary module
> dependences);
> - unused functions (but this is harder to do in a clean way in a language
> that has templates, so this may be omitted).
>
> Among those four warnings the most useful are the first two ones. In C
> once the unused variable warning of GCC has found at compile time a bug in
> my code (I did forget to increment that variable in the loop). So I have
> loved this warning ever since.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

I think I've read somewhere (either the spec or TDPL) that states
unused variables are errors. But I don't agree with that. Make it a
compiler flag if it's really needed. A warning is ok for me.
If I'm just trying out some code, I might use one or another variable
while declaring both. If I only use one and it's an error to leave a
variable unused, then I'm forced to always comment out variables which
I'm not using. It would be too painful to enforce such restrictions
while trying out new code.
On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 3:06 PM, bearophile <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote:
> A small Reddit thread regarding if unused variables and imports are better as errors or warnings:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3emo
>
> In my opinion in this case errors are too much, warning are enough.
>
> Few situations for those warnings:
> - warning for unused variables (as GC, C# and other compilers do);
> - warning when a variable get used in some ways, and then its last assignment gets unused (done by a kind of C compiler);
> - unused imports (useful to keep code clean and remove unnecessary module dependences);
> - unused functions (but this is harder to do in a clean way in a language that has templates, so this may be omitted).
>
> Among those four warnings the most useful are the first two ones. In C once the unused variable warning of GCC has found at compile time a bug in my code (I did forget to increment that variable in the loop). So I have loved this warning ever since.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile
>

dsimcha <dsimcha@yahoo.com> wrote:
> If we make unused imports an error, how is anyone supposed to do import
> someSmallLibrary.all? If you make unused imports an error, the
> collective cost of
> extra import declaration boilerplate will probably be larger than the
> GDP of some
> African countries.
Only give warnings for this for modules specified on the command-line.
////
module foo;
import bar;
////
module bar;
import unused;
////
dmd foo
No problem (as long as the compiler magically finds bar)
dmd foo bar
Warning!
--
Simen

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:i4luk9$2rdg$1@digitalmars.com...
>A small Reddit thread regarding if unused variables and imports are better
>as errors or warnings:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3emo
>
> In my opinion in this case errors are too much, warning are enough.
>
> Few situations for those warnings:
> - warning for unused variables (as GC, C# and other compilers do);
> - warning when a variable get used in some ways, and then its last
> assignment gets unused (done by a kind of C compiler);
> - unused imports (useful to keep code clean and remove unnecessary module
> dependences);
> - unused functions (but this is harder to do in a clean way in a language
> that has templates, so this may be omitted).
>
> Among those four warnings the most useful are the first two ones. In C
> once the unused variable warning of GCC has found at compile time a bug in
> my code (I did forget to increment that variable in the loop). So I have
> loved this warning ever since.
>
An error would be an enormous pain in the ass. A warning might be helpful in
some cases.

On Friday, August 20, 2010 11:35:48 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "bearophile" <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote in message
> news:i4luk9$2rdg$1@digitalmars.com...
>
> >A small Reddit thread regarding if unused variables and imports are better
> >
> >as errors or warnings:
> > http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3emo
> >
> > In my opinion in this case errors are too much, warning are enough.
> >
> > Few situations for those warnings:
> > - warning for unused variables (as GC, C# and other compilers do);
> > - warning when a variable get used in some ways, and then its last
> > assignment gets unused (done by a kind of C compiler);
> > - unused imports (useful to keep code clean and remove unnecessary module
> > dependences);
> > - unused functions (but this is harder to do in a clean way in a language
> > that has templates, so this may be omitted).
> >
> > Among those four warnings the most useful are the first two ones. In C
> > once the unused variable warning of GCC has found at compile time a bug
> > in my code (I did forget to increment that variable in the loop). So I
> > have loved this warning ever since.
>
> An error would be an enormous pain in the ass. A warning might be helpful
> in some cases.
Except that thanks to how warnings are deal with in dmd, there's not much
difference between an error and a warning; it's just a question of how picky you
want to be about errors. As it is, I'd argue that there is no such thing as a
real warning in D. You never see warnings unless you use -w, at which point
they're treated as errors. And if you're being at all careful, you're going to
be compiling with -w, so it doesn't make much difference. You can choose to
compile without -w until you think what you have works and then use -w to find
stuff you missed, but then you could easily be being shot in the foot by
something that's considered a warning. If you had seen it, you could have dealt
with it. What dmd needs is for warnings to be visible in normal compilation,
making -w only make warnings errors as opposed to being the way to make them
appear as well. As it is, warnings pretty much might as well be errors.
- Jonathan M Davis

Yes there are, you enable them with -wi, which are informational
warnings. Some errors are listed here, but I'm not sure which of these
can be used with -wi:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/warnings.html
On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 8:53 PM, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisprog@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, August 20, 2010 11:35:48 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "bearophile" <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote in message
>> news:i4luk9$2rdg$1@digitalmars.com...
>>
>> >A small Reddit thread regarding if unused variables and imports are better
>> >
>> >as errors or warnings:
>> > http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3emo
>> >
>> > In my opinion in this case errors are too much, warning are enough.
>> >
>> > Few situations for those warnings:
>> > - warning for unused variables (as GC, C# and other compilers do);
>> > - warning when a variable get used in some ways, and then its last
>> > assignment gets unused (done by a kind of C compiler);
>> > - unused imports (useful to keep code clean and remove unnecessary module
>> > dependences);
>> > - unused functions (but this is harder to do in a clean way in a language
>> > that has templates, so this may be omitted).
>> >
>> > Among those four warnings the most useful are the first two ones. In C
>> > once the unused variable warning of GCC has found at compile time a bug
>> > in my code (I did forget to increment that variable in the loop). So I
>> > have loved this warning ever since.
>>
>> An error would be an enormous pain in the ass. A warning might be helpful
>> in some cases.
>
> Except that thanks to how warnings are deal with in dmd, there's not much
> difference between an error and a warning; it's just a question of how picky you
> want to be about errors. As it is, I'd argue that there is no such thing as a
> real warning in D. You never see warnings unless you use -w, at which point
> they're treated as errors. And if you're being at all careful, you're going to
> be compiling with -w, so it doesn't make much difference. You can choose to
> compile without -w until you think what you have works and then use -w to find
> stuff you missed, but then you could easily be being shot in the foot by
> something that's considered a warning. If you had seen it, you could have dealt
> with it. What dmd needs is for warnings to be visible in normal compilation,
> making -w only make warnings errors as opposed to being the way to make them
> appear as well. As it is, warnings pretty much might as well be errors.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>

On Friday, August 20, 2010 06:06:17 bearophile wrote:
> A small Reddit thread regarding if unused variables and imports are better
> as errors or warnings: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3emo
>
> In my opinion in this case errors are too much, warning are enough.
>
> Few situations for those warnings:
> - warning for unused variables (as GC, C# and other compilers do);
> - warning when a variable get used in some ways, and then its last
> assignment gets unused (done by a kind of C compiler); - unused imports
> (useful to keep code clean and remove unnecessary module dependences); -
> unused functions (but this is harder to do in a clean way in a language
> that has templates, so this may be omitted).
>
> Among those four warnings the most useful are the first two ones. In C once
> the unused variable warning of GCC has found at compile time a bug in my
> code (I did forget to increment that variable in the loop). So I have
> loved this warning ever since.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile
I agree with #1, #3, and #4 but not #2. It requires control flow analysis to get
that to work, and Walter generally avoids that. _Maybe_ it would be reasonable
if it did not include default initialization as an unused assignment (like the
example in your bug report does), but it's very easy to get into situations
where you _want_ to assign to the variable well after it's assigned, much as
it's generally good practice to initialize it yourself at the point of
declaration. A prime example is if you need to initialize the variable in an
innner scope, but have to have it exist in the outer scope. It would be stupid
if you were forced to initialize the variable to make the warning go away in
this case. It's defaualt initialized.
In more complex cases, the compiler is not going to be able to accurately detect
when something is or isn't going to be assigned to in ever code path, so you'd
be forced to initialize it in spite of the fact that it's default initialized.
This happens all the time in languages like Java, and it's annoying. Default
initialization takes care of the problem.
So, in all but the simple cases, the compiler is not going to be smart enough to
reasonably determine whether you're assigning to a variable multiple times
before it's used. And in the simpler cases where it can, it can optimize away
the extra assignments. I'm sure that there are cases where it would be nice for
the compiler to point out that you're uselessly assigning to a variable
(especially if you're making a useless function call too), but it would cost the
compiler too much in complexity and cost the programmer in many other cases by
forcing them to either ignore warnings (which they should pretty much never do)
or throw in pointless explicit initializations rather than letting the defaults
do their job.
- Jonathan M Davis